TechDirt’s Mike Masnick gets it exactly right in covering Canada’s C-18 bill:
If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something, if you believe that no one should have to pay to provide you a benefit, then you should support Meta’s stance here. Yes, it’s self-serving for Meta. Of course it is. But, even if it’s by accident, or a side-effect, it’s helping to defend the open web, against a ridiculous attack from an astoundingly ignorant and foolish set of Canadian politicians.
And just generally points out the huge holes in Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez understanding from the Power & Politics Interview.
Meta said that to Australia too, but ultimately caved. We need to not let ourselves be frightened by the threats of corporations. They are meant to serve our society, not the other way around.
Sure. Except, if you read the article, this is about a fundamental discussion about paying to link to things. Should every post to Lemmy pay the website it links to?
There’s nuance to be had. Lemmy.ca isn’t Meta or Google. It’s one or two guys running a server in a non-profit capacity. No one here is making profit, we’re just folks sharing links related to our shared interests. That is not true for Meta or Google. Those guys are making money hand over fist. These are not the same situations and there is no reason we have to treat them the same legally.
there is no nuance. Bill C-18 want you to pay to link to something. It’s a piece of legislation written by an industry that can’t figure out how it can work and instead want to be subsidized.
Facebook and Google have the power to stop linking to them. Because that linking IS driving trafic it WILL have an effect.
Two guys running a server will be next. Don’t you worry.
You’re right. Nuance isn’t even needed to see the problem here. Two corporations, mostly one when it comes to news, has cornered the web. For a huge chunk of the population, the web is Facebook or Instagram. For them the internet is Facebook. Linking inside Facebook doesn’t work like it does on the open web, in many ways. One of which is that Facebook wants to link content but not have users actually follow those links. And so there’s no point talking about linking as in the open web and any nuance around it. That’s why the law differentiates this:
The Act will only apply to digital news intermediaries if there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between the operators of a digital news intermediary and the news outlets producing the news content a digital news intermediary makes available.
The rest of the web like the two guys running a server, can be dealt with via the existing copyright law in Canada which is fairly permissive.
We are talking about a bit of different things.
For Meta, or other big company that have data centres, when you received a link you “share” they can basically crawl entire page (cause the visual pop ups that ask you to subscribe or please turn off ad blocker won’t work for bots.) They can have rotating instances so they are never under the 2 free articles per day limit. For lemmy as long as we don’t pre-cache contents, we should be fine as pure links are driving traffic. But on facebook you can expand and read like almost entire articles or click the “read more, source” something like that.
Now back to protect these media company. It is sort of important to have a government funded, NPO run neutral media.(cause we still have a lot of older people that only read news paper and watch TVs.) The rest actually didn’t matter that much. Everyone can have their own bias, but why normalize that bias through news media? Shouldn’t be news just stay as news that reports facts(5W 1H) and leave those “opinions” to whatever other blogs or entirely different non-government funded companies?
So, why should the government protects/helps news agencies that their primary goal is profit and selling their eye ball time and whatever owner’s political bias? Because it helps those that are currently in government?
Doesn’t that “first they came for etc etc” totally apply then? This will definitely lead to news sites targeting smaller social medias then federated social media.
The law targets organizations with significant power imbalance against the news orgs.
Maybe. It depends on what’s linked and how that affects the system. Linking isn’t any different than downloading something which we know is ultimately copying information. There are nuances to copying in regards to copyright laws ethics, etc. And of course it wouldn’t be Lemmy, the app, paying. Maybe not even Lemmy, the instance owner, or the poster since neither of them are profiting from that linking.
That you don’t control other websites’ functions or the ability to link is fundamental to the usefulness of the internet. Adding a web of microtransactions will result in a system controlled by a few with no inovation or open knowledge. If a site doesnt want to opely share data it should add security.
Facebook is not the open web.
Linking is very different from downloading or copying. A link is only a reference to the content, not the content itself. The news site retains full control over the content. If the news site wants to make more money from visitors, they can use ads or paywalls.
And of course it wouldn’t be Lemmy, the app, paying. Maybe not even Lemmy, the instance owner, or the poster since neither of them are profiting from that linking.
What if an instance is getting enough donations to be considered profitable? Drawing the line at profitability just punishes success and efficiency.
BTW a lot of posts in c/canada have snippets copied from the linked articles. How is this any different from FB and google showing links and snippets?
Linking is very different from downloading or copying
It depends on the contents of the link. Is it a bare URL? Is it a text “click here”? Is it the title of the linked page? Is it a snippet of the linked page? You can quickly see how linking can incorporate copying depending on how it’s done. As you acknowledge further down:
BTW a lot of posts in c/canada have snippets copied from the linked articles. How is this any different from FB and google showing links and snippets?
On the point of profitable instances:
What if an instance is getting enough donations to be considered profitable? Drawing the line at profitability just punishes success and efficiency.
When such a successful instance begins having a “significant bargaining power imbalance” (with news businesses), then it isn’t and they’ll become subject to the law and will have to negotiate payments.
I gave the bill a quick read.
It depends on the contents of the link. Is it a bare URL? Is it a text “click here”? Is it the title of the linked page? Is it a snippet of the linked page? You can quickly see how linking can incorporate copying depending on how it’s done.
I consider snippets copying, not linking, but let’s agree to disagree on the terminology, because the bill covers anything from URLs to snippets anyway.
significant bargaining power imbalance
This is what the bill actually says, so we’re small fish and get a free ride.
Y’know, I’m not nearly as against this concept as this suggests. News is… clearly unprofitable in the modern era, and the quality of the average news outlet has fallen drastically in the past few decades. So I’m down for some drastic attempts to recapture that value and reward good reporting.
Obviously this isn’t perfect, it might even be full-out stupid, but I don’t think perfect exists here, and it’s worth trying something here.
Wouldn’t Facebook having to pay news agencies for clicks to their articles result in the problem of low quality clickbait style articles/headlines worse? I get the point you’re trying to make, but I think the way the government is going about things is a bit silly and doesn’t seem apt to make things better. To me it seems like the government fell prey to the lobbying efforts of Bell/Rogers/Telus trying to squeeze more $$$.
Yeah, true. If the definition of “news” here is really as poor as “posted by a “News” site”, then you’re likely right that that would incentivize much of the same behaviour.
Even still though… even companies like Buzzfeed will occasionally fund “hard hitting journalism”. Handing them money blindly like that, though obviously inefficient, may still serve to make more “real journalism” financially viable. And I think there’s still people out there with a passion to do that, provided they could survive doing that.
Agreed in general though, even as a first pass at the idea, this is an awkward and subpar stab at it, with some obvious issues.
Isn’t Vice going out of business and Buzzfeed dying? Both of them got into the clickbaiting culture war topics and both seemed to fail because of it. I still think real journalism is the way to go but it seems to be falling apart and I don’t think this will fix it.
This feels more like a lobbying/corruption filled bill more than anything. The intention doesn’t seem to be really to fix things, but more just to make the big corps more money.
Maybe I’m missing something, but what corps stand to make a lot of money here? This sounds like it’ll cost the social media networks a fair bit of money, and the benefactors are Canadian news networks, none of which are worth a fortune, as far as I’m aware. Seems to me that Meta would’ve been lobbying against this a lot harder than any news sites could’ve afforded to lobby for it. Heck, even news sites seem shaky on it, at least based on the CBC reporter quoted in the article.
Happy to be corrected, I’m just finding it hard to figure out who the “big corps” are that would stand to benefit from this.
Well a lot of the media across Canada is owned by Bell, Rogers, or Shaw. With their current CRTC “connections” and lobbying I’d say they have a lot of power to get their way on these deals. I wouldn’t be surprised hearing the CBC not as in favour since they don’t need to rely on these sorts of funding sources that these other corporations may be hoping to secure.
Ah, that _is _interesting. Thanks for the heads up, I had no idea!
Yes what is a big company in these times? Google is a trillion dollar company I mean that is absolutely insane. People don’t really grasp the vast difference between million and billion and now we have trillion dollar companies.
For all the open web absolutists among us, consider this.
Our democracy depends on the survival of our news media. That should be an uncontestable point. The open web in Canada depends on our democracy. Should it fail, the open web fails with it. If that isn’t obvious, think what undemocratic countries do to the web and why.
This law specifically targets corporations that have an outsized market power against news orgs. It exempts everyone who doesn’t.
If this law helps protect the viability of our news organizations, then it helps protect democracy in Canada and therefore the open web.
Yes, usually linking to canadian news on google and facebook provides a summary of the article as well - so many users are satisfied with reading that and dont click.
So facebook and google get the ad revenue, canadian news outlets rhat produce those headlines get nothing.
If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something
I also believe that I am not a faceless megacorporation. Why should I worry about regulations that specifically only apply to faceless megacorporations?
Because it’s supporting Canadian mega corporations. Read OpenMedia https://action.openmedia.org/page/121153/petition/1?
Guilbeault spewed the same garbage when he was in that seat. Like bullet points from the industry that bought them out.
I believe in democracy over corporations.
I believe in journalism over social media.
Honestly, look at the state of social media today. The libertarian ideal internet has clearly been a complete failure. The libertarian ideals in the technology field has just been an abdication of responsibility. And some horrible corporations and foreign adversaries have filled in that vacuum.
The old school internet libertarians refuse to accept the reality of this failure. So now we’ve reached the point where massive corporations are using the oligopoly power over information distribution to strong arm democratic countries to avoid having to pay taxes. And out of habit and denial the libertarians take the side of Mark fucking Zuckerberg.
All to desperately cling on to an ideology that’s so obviously been a failure. Painfully obvious.
When your ideology demands you defend a massive corporation trying to strong arm a democracy to avoid paying taxes, maybe you should consider the possibility that your ideology might be flawed?
This whole thing doesn’t make sense to me. If the issue is the preview that facebook/google show next to the links then it should already be covered by copyright law. If they want to charge for links without preview then that’s just plain wrong.
The way it targets corporations with more bargaining power than the news industry is also weird. Why does bargaining power matter? Is it because the news industry intends to extract payments from everyone later and they want to give the big tech companies no incentive to come to the smaller players’ defense? Or is it written this way just to avoid naming facebook and google directly?
